Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Visiting Professors at the Top Law Schools, 2009-10 (1st Draft)

As I've done before, I'm posting a list of the visiting professors (who hold university appointments elsewhere) at the top six law schools, the schools that are "top six" by almost all measures of faculty quality--which are also the schools that also typically have the most visiting professors on a regular basis.  While many visiting stints are made with an eye to possible permanent appointment, not all are; some are so-called "podium" visits, which aim to fill an immediate teaching need at the school.   By my calculation, for example, less than 20% of the visits last year resulted in (or are in process of resulting in) offers of permanent employment--but a somewhat higher percentage of the non-podium visits resulted in such offers.  Often visitors from local schools in the area are invited for podium visit purposes--though some "locals" may also be "look-see" visitors, i.e., under consideration for appointment.  NYU also has a fair number of "enrichment" and "global" visitors, well-known senior folks who are keen to spend some time in, but who aren't necessarily interested in, or being considered for, lateral moves.  (Columbia gets some of these folks too.)  From the outside, of course, it's very hard to tell all these apart, so here, without further comment, are the visiting professors for 2008-09; please e-mail me about omissions or corrections, and I will update the list at various intervals over the next couple of months and move it to the front.

Please note that not every visit, below, is for the entire academic year; indeed, my guess is at least half are not, meaning students can expect many of these faculty to *also* be teaching at their home institution.  In the case of HLS, many of the visitors come in the Winter Term, i.e., just the month of January.

Yale Law School

Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia University)

Cristina Rodriguez (New York University)

Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University)

Alexander Stremitzer (University of Bonn)

Patrick Weil (University of Paris, Pantheon-Sorbonne)

David Weisbach (University of Chicago)

Harvard Law School

Albert Choi (University of Virginia)

Alma Cohen (Tel-Aviv University)

Julie Cohen (Georgetown University)

Daniel Coquillette (Boston College)

Lori Fisler Damrosch (Columbia University)

Bada Dharon (Rice University)

Horst Eidenmuller (Ludwig-Maxmillians University)

Annette Gordon-Reed (New York Law School)

Ian Haney Lopez (University of California, Berkeley)

Mattias Kumm (New York University)

Maximo Langer (University of California, Los Angeles)

Richard Lazarus (Georgetown University)

Sanford Levinson (University of Texas, Austin)

Lynn LoPucki (University of California, Los Angeles)

Catharine MacKinnon (University of Michigan)

Michael McConnell (Stanford University)

Geoffrey Miller (New York University)

Erin Murphy (University of California, Berkeley)

Anne Joseph O'Connell (University of California, Berkeley)

James Pfander (Northwestern University)

Jedediah Purdy (Duke University)

Cristina Rodriguez (New York University)

Theodore Ruger (University of Pennsylvania)

Katherine Silbaugh (Boston University)

Dan Simon (University of Southern California)

Lawrence Suskind (Massachussetts Institute of Technology)

Michael Vandenbergh (Vanderbilt University)

Jonathan Wiener (Duke University)

Tobias Wolff (University of Pennsylvania)

University of Chicago Law School

Donald Braman (George Washington University)

Ruoying Chen (Peking University)

Alicia Davis Evans (University of Michigan)

Leslie J. Green (Oxford University)

Youngjae Lee (Fordham University)

Ariel Porat (Tel-Aviv University)

Christopher Serkin (Brooklyn Law School)

James Spindler (University of Southern California)

Julie Suk (Cardozo Law School)

Wataru Tanaka (University of Tokyo)

Stanford Law School

Michael Asimow (University of California, Los Angeles)

Daphne Barak-Erez (Tel-Aviv University)

Siegfried Fina (University of Vienna)

Jim Gibson (Washington University, St. Louis)

Robert Gordon (Yale University)

Adriaan Lanni (Harvard University)

Donald Lewis (University of Hong Kong)

Leo Romero (University of New Mexico)

William Simon (Columbia University; also emeritus, Stanford)

George Triantis (Harvard University)

Jonathan Zitrain (Harvard University)

Columbia Law School

Akhil Amar (Yale University)

John Armour (Oxford University)

Neil Cohen (Brooklyn Law School)

Klaus Hopt (Max Planck Institute)

Michael Knoll (University of Pennsylvania)

Shahar Lifshitz (Bar-Ilan University)

Susan Marks (King's College, London)

Thomas J. Miles (University of Chicago)

Anne Joseph O'Connell (University of California, Berkeley)

Deborah Rhode (Stanford University)

Yuval Shany (Hebrew University)

Paul Stephan (University of Virginia)

New York University School of Law

Jonathan B. Baker (American University)

Samuel Buell (Washington University, St. Louis)

Charles Cameron (Princeton University)

Richard Epstein (University of Chicago)

Annette Gordon-Reed (New York Law School)

Ian Haney-Lopez (University of California, Berkeley)

John Langbein (Yale University)

Erin Murphy (University of California, Berkeley)

Richard Nagareda (Vanderbilt University)

Jide Nzelibe (Northwestern University)

Katharina Pistor (Columbia University)

Richard Pomp (University of Connecticut)

Robert Rabin (Stanford University)

Roberta Romano (Yale University)

Jacqueline E. Ross (University of Illinois)

Daniel Rubinfeld (University of California, Berkeley)

Geoffrey Stone (University of Chicago)

Tobias Wolff (University of Pennsylvania)

An Open Letter to the Chicago Tribune from University of Illinois Law Faculty

Here.  It's quite damning, and rightly so.  The Chicago Tribune journalists should apologize--and, better yet, run a story excorciating the real villains, the corrupt politicans using their leverage over the university to secure favors for friends and constituents.

Rutgers Legal Historian Mark Weiner Chosen as Chancellor's Distinguished Scholar for 2009-10

The Rutgers-Newark press release is here.  Mark is one of the most creative and interesting legal historians around, and the honor is richly deserved.

DePaul Deanship Fiasco Update--More on Provost Epp's Heavy-Handed Tactics

(Start here for earlier coverage.)  Trouble between former DePaul Law Dean Weissenberger and DePaul Provost Epp goes back to at least January of this year, when Provost Epp gave Weissenberger 24 hours to rescind several offers to faculty, senior and junior, even though the offers had been made in accordance with university procedures.   Weissenberger declined, the offers were accepted, and Epp, having obviously overreached, did not pursue the matter further.  But now, of course, he has had his vengeance.

Based on current anecdotal reports, I expect at least 10% of DePaul's law faculty to be gone by the end of the academic year 2009-10; the number may well be higher, though the difficult economic situation means that many schools that would be keen to hire faculty at DePaul may not have the money to do so. 

UPDATE:  Blog Emperor Caron has more details.

Illinois Appellate Judge Warren Wolfson Named Interim Dean at DePaul

The DePaul press release is here.  His academic experience is, not surprisingly, very minimal (he has been an adjunct at Chicago-Kent and a trial advocacy instructor at the University of Chicago); he is primarily a practitioner and a jurist and, I'm told, a well-regarded one.  But one suspects he doesn't know what he's walked into here.  What he ought to do is, after a month or so of housekeeping, resign and encourage the Administration to reinstate Dean Weissenberger.  If he doesn't, my guess is he will spend most of next year bidding farewell to members of the DePaul faculty.

Meanwhile, the University has succeeded in fooling some reporters into thinking that the firing of Dean Weissenberger was unrelated to the letter he wrote to the ABA.  No doubt the plan to replace Weissenberger was in the works for a couple of months, but so was the ABA review process and no doubt for some time Dean Weissenberger was pressing the university to honor the ABA-mandated agreement on law school tuition revenue, long before he felt he had to disclose the university's breach of that agreement to the ABA.   Where are the legal journalists on this issue?  It is not reporting to simply quote the lies and half-truths of the university spokesperson.

And where is the ABA on all this?   This sets a horrible precedent:   the ABA brokers an agreement as part of the accreditation process, and the university then punishes a law school Dean for trying to enforce it.  ABA accreditation is often preoccupied with trivia and intra-law school interest-group politics.  Protecting revenue streams for member schools is actually important.  How can the ABA remain silent while a Dean is fired in retaliation for trying to enforce ABA-mandated agreements?

UPDATE:  More information here, including the text of a resolution sent to the Administration protesting the selection of an Interim Dean without any consultation.    I've gotten more details on Provost Epp's conduct (not for publication at this stage), which now officially qualifies as even more scandalous than is already clear from the public record:  he will destroy the College of Law if not stopped.  Where is the University President?  Where is the Board of Trustees?  In nearly twenty years in legal academia, I have never seen a law school mistreated like this by a university central administration.

ONE MORE:  I should note that I've never met or spoken with or had any contact with Dean Weissenberger.   Concerned members of the DePaul community, and others, have forwarded information to me.

ANOTHER:  Ralph Brill (Chicago-Kent), a longtime friend and colleague of Judge Wolfson, comments on his appointment.

Post Named Dean at Yale Law School

Robert C. Post, a constitutional law scholar, who taught for many years at Berkeley before moving to Yale in 2003, has been named the new Dean, effective July 1. 

DePaul Associate Dean Siegel to Resign Upon Appointment of the Interim Dean

Stephen Siegel, a distinguished constitutional historian and longtime member of the DePaul faculty who is currently Associate Dean, announced this morning that he will resign "effective when the expected announcement is made that an interim dean has been appointed from outside the law school community without any faculty input or consultation."  To his colleagues he wrote in part:

You should notice that, although I strongly disagree with the decision to remove Glen, my resignation is tied into the mode of his replacement.

 

In my 37 years of service to DePaul I have served under 5 deans. (I'm not counting interim and acting deans).  Four of them were replaced mid-term.  The three mid-term replacements before Glen were removed because they had become incompetent or ineffective.  I whole-heartedly welcomed those replacements and only wished the University had acted sooner.  But every previous time, the University turned to the faculty with expectation and trust that we would step into the breech - and we did, superbly, working cooperatively to bring the best out of the situation.  This time, although we have the most talented and prestigous collection of faculty we ever have had - we have effectively been put into a two year receivership - with no consultation, dialogue, trust.

 

Again, I disagree with removing Glen, but the decision could have been implemented with far less collateral damage to our standing.  For example, a simple announcement that Glen had decided to resign effective a year from now - and that a normal seach for a successor to continue our advancement would begin immediately.  Our future has been made far more difficult - the collective work of a generation of faculty and deans, which had finally reached sustained takeoff, was decisively set back. 

Letters to the University President and Provost from other law faculty, including all the junior faculty, have made similar points.  Provost Epp has done extraordinary damage to the College of Law at DePaul, and all because the Dean was using the ABA review process to force the University to abide by a financial agreement the university had breached.  That is what the Dean of the law school is supposed to do; the University Administration is also supposed to abide by its agreements.

 

Who will take the job of Dean at DePaul while Provost Epp remains in office?  No one with any academic credibility quite obviously--all this reminds me of the Irvine Deanship fiasco, which, if Chancellor Drake had not wisely reversed himself, would have spelled the end of the new UCI law school before it began.  No one serious, or with any self-respect, wants to be Dean of a law school where the Administration behaves caprciously and recklessly, whether out of incompetence, vanity, or in response to external political pressures (the latter not, presumably, an issue in the DePaul case).  One imagines that many law schools in the Chicago area, as well as nationally, are looking over the faculty roster at DePaul this weekend thinking about whom they might recruit.

 

So will Provost Epp have the wisdom of Chancellor Drake?  In the midst of a severe economic downturn, including in the legal market, removing a successful Dean who is, by all accounts, well-liked and respected by faculty, staff, students, and alumni all because the Dean stood up for the interests of his College really defies belief.  There is, perhaps, someone at DePaul who ought to be summarily removed from office, but it does not appear to be Dean Weissenberger.

 

UPDATE:  The full text of various open letters from faculty are here.

DePaul Provost Ousts Law Dean Without Consulting Faculty, Plans to Appoint an Outsider as Interim Dean

DePaul University Provost Helmut Epp yesterday sent the following e-mail to the faculty:

I write today to inform you that there will be a change in leadership at the College of Law effective immediately. At my recommendation, the president and I have removed Glen Weissenberger as dean and hired a new interim dean who will be announced soon.

I can assure you that this decision, which is being made in the best interests of our students and the College of Law, was made only after long and careful thought and consideration.  I respect all you have accomplished under Glen's leadership.  However, the working relationship between the dean and the administration had deteriorated to the point where it had become difficult to accomplish the college's work, hence my recommendation to the president for this action....

We have selected a highly qualified and respected member of the legal community to serve as interim dean, ensure a smooth transition and continue the momentum you have given to the college. I look forward to making an announcement about the candidate in the very near future.

By all accounts, Dean Weissenberger was successful and popular with his faculty (he had been reappinted to a second five-year term in 2007).  In response to Provost Epp's e-mail, and to an outpouring of support from the faculty, Professor Weissenberger wrote to faculty and staff of the Law School this morning:

I want to assure you that I was not terminated for any wrong doing of any kind.  My termination was based specifically on a letter I sent to the ABA supplementing information which the ABA already received.  I was told by the ABA that I had a duty to submit this information immediately because the Accreditation Committee is meeting next week.  I gave notice to the University that I would be filing the separate letter.  I am attaching a copy of the letter, because it is part of the record in our ABA accreditation process.

The ABA documents are here:  Download DePaul ABA.  It's a lengthy set of materials, but I believe the following is an accurate summary:  the College of Law at DePaul was entitled to 75% of its tuition revenues under an ABA-enforced agreement between the College and the University Administration; the University has repeatedly breached this agreement.  Professor Weissenberger challenged the University's failure to honor the agreement.  Now he's been fired.

I suppose it is worth noting that Provost Epps was part of the Administration during the Finkelstein tenure scandal, when the Administration of DePaul also did not discharge itself admirably.

I will post more information as it becomes available.  Signed comments from members of the DePaul community, or others with knowledge, are welcome.  THE COMMENTS MUST INCLUDE A FULL NAME AND VALID E-MAIL ADDRESS, or they won't appear.  Please post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

Kennedy to Return to Harvard Law from Brown

David Kennedy (international law), who moved less than three years ago to Brown University to become Vice-President for International Affairs, will rejoin the faculty of Harvard Law School this fall.

Dan Filler's List of Lateral Moves for 2009

Updated here.  Some of those on his list appeared here, but others did not.  A couple that have appeared here (Thomas Merrill from Yale back to Columbia, Ronald Mann from Columbia back to Texas) do not appear on Filler's list, perhaps because they won't happen until 2010, I'm not sure.  Anyway, submit comments over there to complete the list.